Hey, let's refer to the band in this song as "we"
Now that I wrote something about music, perhaps I'll next translate one of Tommi's old observations about music.
An average home page tends to discuss a lot its owner's taste in music. Apparently in our safe society it is difficult or impossible to construct a life story that didn't bore even the most interested reader in a few seconds. On the other hand, the common babble and theoretical analysis about emotions and values has banalized pretty much every expression somehow related to "self" or personality. The only thing left to post is a list of links to the home pages of bands, so that a lucky surfer might find the message meant just for him hidden in some verse of some song, where it is given in a subtle and very sophisticatedly indirect form.
The second most common trend is to claim that you are a unique individualist who cannot be depicted with definitions and thus you are unable to describe yourself with anything as flat as the list of your favourite music.
Hence, as a dead-serious pursuer of originality I am now surrounded from two directions at once, and since I have already given up the possibility of remaining silent about this topic (which is qualitatively the third most common and quantitatively the most common option), I dodge this responsibility by revealing that I have found myself to be a very bad or at most an average music fan. Many times I have witnessed accounts of musical tastes of other people that were so detailed and emotional that I will never be able to top them.
I shall therefore stick to some of my socially motivated theses, which are:
- Jimi Hendrix was at most an average guitar player, a bad composer and an even worse writer of lyrics. Besides, he has the most humourless and sobersided fans.
- Nobody wants to listen to the scratchy records of old bluesmen and yes, all their songs sound exactly the same.
- Playing music in public looks stupid. It is especially embarrassing to see the poor musician expressing the strength of his emotions and the excellence of his song with his facial expressions, gestures and movements.
- Traditional musical instruments can be replaced by computers, and the money and time spent in learning to play them can be used for something more useful.
- Beatles was a manufactured band for little girls, that's all.
- Jim Morrison was the most pitiful, childish and untalented character in the history of (pop) music.
- So far, all music that girls love has turned out to be bad.
- Supporting music and other arts with tax money should end, with the exception of the library system. On the other hand, the Internet may make libraries redundant in a decade or two. In my opinion, producing literature printed in paper should also be ended since it is obsolete and ecologically inefficient.
As a side note related to the title of this post, I recently asked my wife if she can name any other reasonably well-known songs than "You're So Vain" that are self-referential. She couldn't think of any offhand, and neither could I. Can my readers?
"So far, all music that girls love has turned out to be bad."
The funny thing is that teenage girls discovered Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones (and maybe Elvis?) first. When my late mother-in-law was 15 in 1945, she used to put on her bobbysox and take the El to see Frank Sinatra.
For some reason, though, the teenybopper hot streak ran out around 1965.
Posted by Steve Sailer | 11:19 PM
Does this count?
Posted by Anonymous | 2:47 AM